


I've Seen Your Flag On The Marble Arch

by prairiecrow



Series: One Degree of Separation [8]
Category: A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)
Genre: Abandonment, F/M, Longing, M/M, Reclaiming Love, Regret
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-12
Updated: 2012-10-12
Packaged: 2017-11-16 04:45:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/535640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prairiecrow/pseuds/prairiecrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Allen Hobby has chosen to give up a relationship he could never openly reveal in favour of a love that society will accept and embrace. Why, then, can't he sleep at night?</p>
            </blockquote>





	I've Seen Your Flag On The Marble Arch

Allen Hobby lay beside the woman he loved in the cool darkness of an autumn night, and tried doggedly to relax into sleep. His flesh was weary with the sweet heaviness that followed lovemaking and his memory was replete with whispered words of shared tenderness and devotion; he should have been at peace, his life now so much simpler, his feet set on a path that society as a whole recognized and fully approved. 

He could not manage it. Even though he had recently divested himself of a hidden emotional life, he was finding little comfort in the knowledge that he could now openly express his preferences without setting a chain of malicious whispers, or far worse, in motion. He was with someone who, being composed of flesh and blood, could fully understand him and embrace him: something to be celebrated, surely, after spending almost two years chained, by his own choice, in a liaison that could never be openly acknowledged. Now he was finally freed from that secret, and the years ahead were full of the promise of a warm, and human, future.

He should have been at peace. Instead he was tormented by what, by all reasonable accounts, he should have cast away long before this night: an unhealthy devotion to a clever toy, granted a simulation of life by arcane rites that he understood far too well to have been taken in by their tricks.

Rain pattered on the bedroom window, driven by sharp gusts of cold wind, and Hobby felt an equal chill penetrate him even in the warmth of this shared and luxurious bed. He had found a companion with whom he could conceivably spend the rest of his life. Why then did he feel so relentlessly alone?

He could not deny it: they haunted him, those brilliant green eyes that had looked past the surface and through his words, until their clear gaze had touched his heart in its lonely keep and granted him consolation, solace, and connection. He could not deny that while Pamela's body and mind and heart provided wonderful satisfaction in the act of love, his flesh burned just as deeply for an alien touch. 

More deeply, perhaps, for now, in the aftermath of sexual satisfaction, the yearning for Joe remained, unquenched and unquenchable... and it was for far more than merely a counterfeit of human sensuality.

He gazed across the mattress at the pale curve of the shoulder of the woman he loved and thought of the joy he saw each morning, expressed in her whole mortal body… of her kindness, her wit, her relentless intelligence… of how he could talk to her about anything under the sun, and be confident of her comprehension… but she did not know the secret he kept, the priceless memories of David, and he knew now that if he tried to explain it to her she would almost certainly prove incapable of understanding it. Whereas Joe had always known, because he carried the same secret like a reliquary of ebony and ivory and jade, suspended in flawless memory that even Hobby's desire could not match.

In that respect Joe had always been superior to the man who was his master. No mortal mind could match the brain of a mecha for recording every instant lived with crystal clarity, or for purity of intent: its scope was more limited, but its powers of focus were second to none.

 _I still have his memories._ And that was true: back at Cybertronics Manhattan, Joe's cube scans from immediately after David's disappearance were maintained on file. _I can access them any time I want to. I don't need Joe for that._

Perfectly true. And at the same time, perfectly false. Another memory rose, a whole cascade of them in fact: a thousand glances that Joe had given him over the nearly two years that Hobby had owned him, variously questioning and eager and full of that reflective quality that Hobby had never seen in any other mecha before or since, other than David 2. Gazes that had reached inside him and effortlessly closed the distance that separated their widely different species, creating a compact that nobody else recognized, because it should never have existed between a man of Hobby's expertise and one of the creatures he had spent his life studying, designing and deconstructing.

A machine, designed and built specific like all the rest of its kind. One among thousands, all identical. A mechanism no more significant than an automobile or a coffee maker, and certainly owed no more consideration.

Yet Hobby could not sleep for remembering those beautifully shining eyes… and the final gaze they had turned on him, desperate and questioning, when Joe had realized that he was being turned over to the placement agency…

But he hadn't said a word. Why not? Mecha did not experience emotions in the human sense, but the quality of Joe's expression had been as close to anguish as any Hobby had ever witnessed from a simulator.

Hobby closed his own eyes tightly and willed that image away. It went, but only to admit another immediately in its wake: Joe at the Flesh Fair with David 2 in his arms, gazing down at the robotic child with the calm beauty of a Madonna —

— and as clearly as if it were happening right in front of him, Hobby saw another Flesh Fair, this one not yet come to pass. He saw Joe chained to an identical machine, looking up into the crowd that howled for his destruction with an expression of resigned perplexity.

The mecha's lips moved, once, forming a single whispered word: _Allen…_

And then the rain of acid descended, and Hobby had to turn his face into the pillow, barely managing not to flinch and disturb Pamela's slumber.

_I've sent him to that destruction._

But he hadn't. He'd taken Joe to an agency that would —

 _As surely as if I'd placed him in the hands of Johnson-Johnson or another of his ilk,_ the voice of his conscience persisted. _I did exactly what Joe had always expected me to do in the end: when he became inconvenient, I threw him away._

And that was not the worst of it. Further into the future he could sense all the days and nights when he would turn, automatically seeking that bright inhuman clarity — and would find it missing. A dark wave of grief rose and crashed down upon him at the thought of a merciless future with that emptiness always beside him, in his heart and in his arms, never to be filled again.

A future without that devotion. A future without that mystery. 

A future without Joe.

It cleaved him open like a silver blade, laying everything bare right down to the anguished beating of his heart and to a core of fundamental emotion that blazed with its own fierce radiance, its revelation imparting a shock so deep that Hobby scarcely felt the monumental impact of it. The darkness of death could not stand against it; nor could any falsehood, and neither could the socially acceptable motivation he'd so desperately wanted to embrace. He blazed with its tempering heat and had to push back the blankets that covered him, rising to his feet with the surety of pure instinct. With swift deliberation he began stripping off his pajamas.

From the bed behind him, a drowsy querulous murmur: "Allen…?"

"It's all right, Pamela." He answered almost absently, refocussed now on his proper goal, the honourable goal, the one in harmony with the vows he'd long ago made to his soul's unlikely but undeniable mate: _I'll never abandon you, Joe. I promise you that._ "Go back to sleep. I'm just stepping out for a moment."

She fell silent and did not turn over. It was a small mercy, but Hobby was too preoccupied to spare more than a passing thought for it. It wasn't until he was fully dressed and had reached the bedroom door that a competing impulse checked him in his tracks; hand on the latch, he turned to gaze at her peaceful sleeping body one final time.

What had given him pause was a brief urge to kiss her goodbye. He elected to refrain. It would scarcely be proper now, when his heart had already been returned to the keeping of another.

He set out into the bitterly cold night to reclaim his lover, and he did not look back again.

THE END 

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen, as performed by Rufus Wainwright:
> 
> "Maybe I've been here before  
> I know this room, I've walked this floor  
> I used to live alone before I knew you  
> I've seen your flag on the marble arch  
> Love is not a victory march  
> It's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah"
> 
> Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbO6P-_Zx0Y


End file.
